Download or read book Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City written by Danai S. Mupotsa and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-30 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective. “Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the “African urban”. Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion. Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.
Download or read book Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema written by Addamms Mututa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.
Download or read book South African urban imaginaries cases from Johannesburg written by Richard Ballard and published by GCRO. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do government officials, elected politicians, powerful economic actors and ordinary people think and talk about the urban geography of South Africa? How do they describe and represent change that is happening in cities, towns and villages? Do they consider these changes to be good or bad? How do they think such places should change? What do they do to try to bring about the changes they desire? Competing answers to these questions have been at the centre of South Africa’s urban development. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, white minority governments straddled quite contradictory imaginaries about who could build lives for themselves in urban areas and on what terms. Ordinary people held their own urban imaginaries that were quite different to those of white minority governments, and were core to the fight for democracy. In the democratic era, a range of official and popular imaginaries offer diverse visions on how South Africans should be transformed. In an earlier collection produced under the GCRO Spatial Imaginaries project, we explored the sometimes contradictory nature of post-apartheid urban visions with, for example, with some promoting the creation of new urban settlements on greenfield sites, and others attempting to densify and diversify long urbanised spaces. Research Report 13, South African urban imaginaries: Cases from Johannesburg, is a second edited collection under the Spatial Imaginaries project, and it uses a series of cases from Johannesburg that illustrate the interactions between urban imaginaries and the material city. These cases include: the depiction of central business districts in film as spaces of aspiration; the way in which the imaginaries of developers in Hillbrow were shaped by the lives of those living there; the imaginaries of Alexandra Renewal Project practitioners; the way in which residents of Brixton understand diversity; and the construction of two new bridges across the M1 to better connect Sandton and Alexandra.
Download or read book Narratives of Place in Literature and Film written by Steven Allen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.
Download or read book African Film written by Josef Gugler and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In African Film: Re-imagining a Continent, Josef Gugler provides an introduction to African cinema through an analysis of 15 films made by African filmmakers. These directors set out to re-image Africa; their films offer Western viewers the opportunity to re-imagine the continent and its people. As a point of comparison, two additional films on Africa--one from Hollywood, the other from apartheid South Africa--serve to highlight African directors' altogether different perspectives. Gugler's interpretation considers the financial and technical difficulties of African film production, the intended audiences in Africa and the West, the constraints on distribution, and the critical reception of the films.
Download or read book Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty First Century written by Mahir Saul and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century brings together a set of fascinating essays by international scholars on these contrasting cinema forms.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities written by Sebastian Thies and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.
Download or read book Symbolic Narratives African Cinema written by June Givanni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas held in London in 1995, film-makers, cultural theorists and critics gathered to debate a range of issues. Views were exchanged on such topics as imperialism, and the problems of distribution.
Download or read book New York in Cinematic Imagination written by Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in film. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in films of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of "agitated urban modernity" articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of film, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City.
Download or read book African Filmmaking written by Roy Armes and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critique of filmmaking in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa by noted film scholar Roy Ames
Download or read book Urban Film and Everyday Practice written by Alexandra Parker and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While urban films often reinforce spatial stereotypes, they can also produce a resistant reading that helps transgress spatial boundaries, especially in in urban contexts where spatial inequalities and urban divisions are stark. This book reveals the nature of urban film's influence through the lens and space of Johannesburg.
Download or read book Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema written by James S. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.
Download or read book Slum Imaginaries and Spatial Justice in Philippine Cinema written by Katrina Macapagal and published by . This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Africa Shoots Back written by Melissa Thackway and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filmmakers in sub-Saharan francophone Africa have been using cinema since independence in the 1960s to challenge Western stereotypes. This text shows how directors have produced alternatives, focusing on issues of memory and history.
Download or read book From Tinseltown to Bordertown written by Celestino Deleyto and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author’s direct observation and experience of the city’s social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can’t Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the “real place” in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto’s monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States’ most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.
Download or read book Cinema and Development in West Africa written by James E. Genova and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Illuminates the enduring importance of political and economic dynamics not yet fully explored in the study of African cinema.” —Africa Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.
Download or read book Focus on African Films written by Françoise Pfaff and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-13 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Focus on African Films' offers pluralistic perspectives on filmmaking across Africa, highlighting the distinct thematic, stylistic, and socioeconomic circumstances of African film production.
